The following is my vow, published the night before the Obama-McCain election.

I hereby vow that if Obama wins:

I will remove my McCain campaign bumper stickers shortly after he is sworn in.  I will not leave them on my bumper until Obama leaves office.

Even though we already know Obama betrayed his promise in order to gain a massive financial advantage over McCain, used massive illegal foreign donations to fund ACORN and similar organizations which have choked the polls with errant registrations, and though he could never have reached election day without the appalling assistance of 98% of the media, I will never refer to the election as “stolen” or a “coup d’etat”.  Massive voting problems should prompt future reforms, not invalidate the election.  No matter how dirty the election, he will still be my President.

I will never own a “days until Obama is out of office” countdown calendar.

I will never pass on every verbal stumble as proof he is a moron, or buy books or calendars asserting such.  (Granted, despite the man’s utter inability to speak without a teleprompter, no one will ever make such an assertion or assemble such a book because he’s a Democrat.)
Caveat:  Joe Biden is fair game.  It is wrong to conclude someone is a moron purely because of verbal stumbles that we all would make if called upon to speak for hours every day.  However, Joe Biden is clearly a moron.

I will not adopt a cutesy insulting nickname for Obama and use that whenever referring to him in order to avoid calling him the President of the United States.  I’m not Steven Grant.

Despite Obama’s lack of all experience and his veep having served 30 years as a Senator, I will never accuse him of being a puppet of his veep or of any other Democrat handlers.  He has his own agenda and I will let him own it.

I will never call Obama “Hitler” or a “Nazi,” even though his agenda is socialism and he would thus deserve the label more than Bush ever did.  Similarly, no pictures or photos will ever be digitally altered to give him a Hitler mustache.

I will not find some animal or inanimate object that Obama resembles and then call him that or assemble photos of him beside that thing.

I will not celebrate any lying photographer who cons Obama into unflattering poses and then creates mocking pictures of him on his/her personal site.

If any organization affiliated with Obama is enriched due to the direction of the country under Obama, I will not insist that Obama’s motivations are wholly to enrich that organization.

If Obama makes reasonable, logical statements that are backed up by the information known at the time, but these facts prove to be incorrect, I will not call him a liar.
CAVEAT: If Obama says things that he knows are untrue, I will call him a liar.
NOTE: This is pretty likely to happen given that it already does happen.

I will admonish any right-wing blog which dismisses Michelle Obama for being a woman, or which photo manipulates her image in a sleazy way.  I will not adopt any kind of rude nickname for her, or hold her up for mockery for anything unrelated to political statements which she makes.
CAVEAT: Michelle Obama is likely to be a politically active First Lady and will go on to say many, many more dumb things.  These are fair game.  So are things like her complaining about spending thousands on music lessons while still pretending to be one with the commoners.

Obama’s daughters are totally off-limits.  If they do something stupid, I will admonish any blogs which gossip about them.  Their parents are in politics; they aren’t.

I will not demand Obama’s resignation or impeachment for making decisions that are consistent with being President.

Obama will take office while the War on Terror is still going on, and unless he is even dumber than he appears to be I can only assume he will take some steps to fight terrorism, regardless of what actions he takes in the current fronts of the war (Iraq and Afghanistan).  I will not assume that Obama’s every action in this is a malicious move towards oppressing the American people.

If Obama, too, fails to capture Osama bin Laden, I will not assume he is not trying.  (If he cuts the military budget and pulls back our forces, of course, he clearly would not be trying. Such valid conclusions would still be permissible.)

Finally, the big one…and probably the only resolution that will take any real effort:

Obama’s judges, U.N. representatives, cabinet officials, diplomats, etc. are his to appoint.  If elected, he is the President and he does not have to appoint people who are ideologically acceptable to Republicans.  Even if they had the numbers to do so, the Republicans should not resort to the underhanded Democrat tricks like threats of filibustering or leaving posts empty for years just out of spite.  This is going to be a bitter pill to swallow, but I will remind myself that the President has the right to appoint qualified people who are in line with his thinking.  Most people would say that turnabout is fair play, or even that Republicans need to learn to quit rolling over on judges and be as nasty as Democrats when it comes to this… and I know that Democrats aren’t going to learn anything from examples of good behavior.  Let’s try to look at the positive side: Obama’s likely to nominate people so radical that they can be legitimately disqualified.

Oh yeah:

I will never threaten to move to Canada because Obama is taking our country to Hell in a handbasket.  And not just because moving to Canada makes no sense if you’re fleeing Socialism.  I love my country and I will work for Obama’s loss in the next election when I vote for Sarah Palin.

Should things ever become so dire under Obama’s Presidency that I would have to leave the land that I love to flee to Australia, I will not threaten to do so.  I will move and then verify my change of residency with a photo of me in front of that weird horseshoe crab opera house or the big rock, and only then will I elucidate why I felt compelled to do so.

I hope all Republicans will join me.

In this vow, I mean.  (In Australia only if it comes to that.)

We need to lead by example.  Had America’s Democrats ever taken a similar vow, we would be living in a far healthier country.